Vasuki Nesiah

New York University, Gallatin School, Faculty Member

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Professor of Human Rights and International Law at the Gallatin School, New York University
Address: Brooklyn, New York, United States

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Muqtedar Khan

University of Delaware

Benjamin Isakhan

Deakin University

Robert Knox

University of Liverpool

Babette Babich

Fordham University

Charles Walker

University of California, Davis

Remo Caponi

University of Cologne

Dickens Leonard

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

MARGO TAMEZ

University of British Columbia

Yannis Hamilakis

Brown University

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Papers by Vasuki Nesiah

The Fog of Peace: Who Profits from Economic Sanctions?

Yale Journal of International Law Online, 2023

Sanctions vs. Militarization; Peace v. Conflict; Trade v. Aggression; Law v. War: These dichotomy... more Sanctions vs. Militarization; Peace v. Conflict; Trade v. Aggression; Law v. War: These dichotomy have been central to the framing of 'sanctions' as the humanitarian, pacific policy. Yet the history of sanctions shows us that sustaining the myth of these dichotomies exacerbates the precarity of the most vulnerable and is to the profit of the most powerful actors, whether the currency is battlefield victories or economic gain.

Feminist Approaches to International Law

Social Science Research Network, 2021

This chapter offers accounts of three feminist “success stories,” each of which has invoked a sen... more This chapter offers accounts of three feminist “success stories,” each of which has invoked a sense of crisis to call for carceral and militarized international legal responses. We argue that these projects have reinforced many dangerous aspects of both feminism and international law, as they have used a focus on harm to women – particularly sexual harm – to aid in the legitimization and extension of legal, military and economic institutional arrangements that exacerbate the precarity of marginalized individuals, communities, and states. Their use of crisis has participated in the crowding out of a variety of alternative feminist (and other) perspectives, particularly those that take aim at the often quotidian forms of violence based in the overlapping structures of colonialism, racism, gender normativity, and gross economic inequality. We contend that anti-imperial and sex-positive feminisms as well as queer theory offer important vehicles for challenging the dominant approaches. We gesture toward how they might even consider invoking crisis (such as the often everyday and unnoticeable crises of neocolonial, neoliberal, carceral, and militarized dimensions of global governance) to foster transformative feminist, queer, and redistributive ends.

Slavery's Afterlives: Humanitarian Imperialism and Free Contract

AJIL Unbound

In 1833, slavery was abolished across the British Empire, but its specter continued to haunt the ... more In 1833, slavery was abolished across the British Empire, but its specter continued to haunt the new labor regimes inaugurated in slavery's wake. While much of the analysis of these dynamics focuses on the triangular trade in the Atlantic, this essay focuses on the Indian Ocean. Slavery was largely replaced by indentured labor in the Indian Ocean world, marking a historically significant shift in the political economy of empire, the legal architecture of labor, and the discourses through which the imperial racial capitalist system was legitimated and contested. In the decades that followed, labor became incorporated into market institutions that continued into the post-colonial era. Yet, today, almost two hundred years later, slavery's spectral presence continues to inhabit international labor policy. I argue that the reference to slavery was incorporated into discourses of protection and free contract in ways that sought to sanitize and rationalize regimes of indenture and ...

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Freedom at sea

London Review of International Law, 2019

The Amistad case deals with an 1839 slave-ship rebellion seeking to reverse the middle passage. T... more The Amistad case deals with an 1839 slave-ship rebellion seeking to reverse the middle passage. The rebels reimagine freedom in counterpoint to liberal freedom and legal authority—a domain that intertwined emancipation and enslavement, the age of liberty and the Black Atlantic, the distance between continents and tides binding them together, redemption of American humanism and attacks on Black humanity.

Nathaniel Berman. Passion and Ambivalence. Colonialism, Nationalism and International Law

European Journal of International Law, 2013

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“A Mad and Melancholy Record”: The Crisis of International Law Histories

Notre Dame Journal of International & Comparative Law, 2021

CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Notre Dame Law School: ... more CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Notre Dame Law School: NDLScholarship 1 The words "mad and melancholy record" are taken from Robert Jackson's description of the history that the Nuremberg trials told but it could equally be, I argue, the story told about international law itself.

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Gender and Forms of Conflict

Oxford Handbooks Online

This chapter compares and contrasts the successes and failures of “conflict mapping” in internati... more This chapter compares and contrasts the successes and failures of “conflict mapping” in international humanitarian law (IHL) and international conflict feminism (ICF), a phrase the author uses to refer to feminist initiatives aimed at strengthening international law and policy’s response to women’s experiences. The chapter begins by describing the IHL regime for classification of forms of conflict and the consequences of these stratifications on conflict resolution. It addresses the strategies of ICF, and the challenge it brings to the conflict maps of IHL for not adequately addressing women’s specific needs. The chapter then questions the conflict maps of ICF. It demonstrates the ways in which ICF’s approach to gender, while commendable, can also be simplistic and inadequate.

Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures

The Trials of History : Losing Justice in the Monstrous and the Banal

The ambitions and traumas of transitional governance

Feminism as counter-terrorism: the seduction of power: Vasuki Nesiah

ABSTRACT Feminism as Counter-terrorism: The Seduction of Power in Gender, National Security and C... more

Critical Legal Studies

Chapter 1. The Escher–Human Rights Escalator: Technologies of the Local

German colonialism, reparations and international law

While Namibia’s political independence was an important first step, the decolonization process di... more While Namibia’s political independence was an important first step, the decolonization process did not confront two pivotal dimensions of colonial legacies. The first involves the external brutalities of racial capitalism and the economically exploitative world order that was birthed in the age of European empires and which contemporary imperial formations continue to reproduce. The second involves the internal brutalities of German colonialism, especially the genocidal policies undertaken against the Ovaherero and Nama communities. Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) is a critical school of international legal scholarship and practice that seeks to reckon fully with colonial legacies to understand international legal history and interpret international laws and norms. A unifying feature of TWAIL analysis is its attention to the histories and legacies of colonialism and slavery, as well as the legal, economic and institutional architecture that enables the unjust wor...

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Indebted

Governance Feminism, 2019

Territorial Sovereignty in ICJ Jurisprudence

Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting, 1998

Decolonial CIL: TWAIL, Feminism, and an Insurgent Jurisprudence

AJIL Unbound, 2018

In advancing a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) analysis of customary internat... more In advancing a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) analysis of customary international law (CIL) and its dominant doctrinal conceits, B.S. Chimni shows how the jurisprudence of custom has been co-constitutive with colonization and capitalism. He contends that CIL's most fundamental assumption—the “supposed distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘material’ sources of CIL”—privileges Western states while legitimizing CIL as a neutral and universal body of law. In dialogue with Chimni, this essay extends the conversation in two directions. First, I show that there are important resonances between Chimni's deconstruction of the distinction between “formal” and “material” sources of CIL, and a feminist critique of the public/private distinction in international law. Chimni describes his approach as postmodern. I argue that its analysis of the conceptual architecture of the dominant doctrine and its systematic exclusions is also, at its core, a feminist approach to inter...

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Review of Nathaniel Berman, Passion and Ambivalence. Colonialism, Nationalism and International Law, The European Journal of International Law Vol. 24 no. 2

European Journal of International Law

Sexy Dressing, Gender and Legal Theory: A Style of Political Engagement

Transnational Legal Theory, 2014

ABSTRACT Taking the title of Duncan Kennedy&#39;s essay as an invitation to think about polit... more ABSTRACT Taking the title of Duncan Kennedy&#39;s essay as an invitation to think about political form, I want to draw on the &#39;style&#39; of gender and legal theory that Kennedy advances. To this end, I don&#39;t engage with the specific arguments advanced in Sexy Dressing but read it as an essay performing a form of political intervention that may be best understood by unveiling the elements of that form. In an effort to highlight the work of different elements, I describe them through the following nomenclature: the Sacred, the Profane, Erotics, Conflict, Voodoo and Risk. These function as shorthand code for the form of political engagement that Sexy Dressing manifests—although, significantly, not as a manifesto.

The princely impostor: stories of law and pathology in the exercise of emergency powers

Emergency Powers in Asia

The Fog of Peace: Who Profits from Economic Sanctions?

Yale Journal of International Law Online, 2023

Feminist Approaches to International Law

Social Science Research Network, 2021

Slavery's Afterlives: Humanitarian Imperialism and Free Contract

AJIL Unbound

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Freedom at sea

London Review of International Law, 2019

Nathaniel Berman. Passion and Ambivalence. Colonialism, Nationalism and International Law

European Journal of International Law, 2013

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“A Mad and Melancholy Record”: The Crisis of International Law Histories

Notre Dame Journal of International & Comparative Law, 2021

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Gender and Forms of Conflict

Oxford Handbooks Online

Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures

The Trials of History : Losing Justice in the Monstrous and the Banal

The ambitions and traumas of transitional governance

Feminism as counter-terrorism: the seduction of power: Vasuki Nesiah

ABSTRACT Feminism as Counter-terrorism: The Seduction of Power in Gender, National Security and C... more

Critical Legal Studies

Chapter 1. The Escher–Human Rights Escalator: Technologies of the Local

German colonialism, reparations and international law

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Indebted

Governance Feminism, 2019

Territorial Sovereignty in ICJ Jurisprudence

Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting, 1998

Decolonial CIL: TWAIL, Feminism, and an Insurgent Jurisprudence

AJIL Unbound, 2018

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Review of Nathaniel Berman, Passion and Ambivalence. Colonialism, Nationalism and International Law, The European Journal of International Law Vol. 24 no. 2

European Journal of International Law

Sexy Dressing, Gender and Legal Theory: A Style of Political Engagement

Transnational Legal Theory, 2014

The princely impostor: stories of law and pathology in the exercise of emergency powers

Emergency Powers in Asia

The Spirit of Bandung

Bandung, Global History, and International Law

luis eslava, michael fakhri, and vasuki nesiah* understanding bandung On April 18-24, 1955, deleg... more luis eslava, michael fakhri, and vasuki nesiah* understanding bandung On April 18-24, 1955, delegates from twenty-nine states attended a conference in Bandung, Indonesia. 1 The meaning of the events that took place during those days was disputed then and now. Bandung has generated, as a result, myths and countermyths, hopes and disappointments, solidarities and fractious disputes, visions for international law and its subversion. In fact, scholars and politicians refer to the conference by different names: the Asian-African Conference, the Bandung Conference, or simply Bandung. Each of these names signals a different understanding of the Conference and a different conceptualization of both its origins and horizons. Bandung was born of the challenges of grappling with the legacies of European imperialism, their long reach from the past, as well as their transmutation into the structures of the current world order. 2 However, it also had, a forward-looking, almost utopian dimension with an unprecedented number of peoples across the world actively reimagining, changing, and prefiguring the rules of the global order. Newly independent countries such as Indonesia and India had begun to assert their presence in international politics and law. Postcolonial states that were previously held together within different empires * We thank Sundhya Pahuja for her attentive reading of this introduction and Esther Sherman and Sarah Rutledge for their editorial assistance with the entire volume.

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The New Histories of International Criminal Law: Retrials (Oxford University Press, 2019)

by Thomas Skouteris, Lawrence Douglas, Christopher Gevers, Vasuki Nesiah, and Franziska Exeler

Seventy years after Nuremberg and Tokyo, and twenty years after the Rome Conference, internationa... more Seventy years after Nuremberg and Tokyo, and twenty years after the Rome Conference, international criminal law seems to have developed a ‘Whig’ historiography of its own. This historiography at times creates a mythological life of past law and its institutions and actors, and on which – in the absence of a glorious present to laud – hopes for a shiny new future are built.
This volume is boldly calling for a retrial of this historiographical tradition, in fact many of them: Retrials.
Carefully curated, and with contributions by leading scholars, Retrials pursues three research objectives: to bring to the fore the structure and function of contemporary histories of international criminal law, to take issue with the consequences of these histories, and to call for their demystification. The essays discern several registers on which the received historiographical tradition must be retried: tropology; inclusions/exclusions; gender; race; representations of the victim and the perpetrator; history and memory; ideology and master narratives; international criminal law and hegemonic theories; and more.
Retrials intervenes critically in the fields of international (criminal) law and international legal history by bringing in new voices and fresh approaches. Taken as a whole, it provides a rich account of the dilemmas, conundrums and possibilities entailed in writing histories of international criminal law beyond, against, or in the shadow of the master narrative.

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A double take on debt

Lawfare, CVE and International Conflict Feminism

Chapter in The Cunning of Gender Violence, edited by Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami and Nadera Shalhoub , 2002

In early 2018 The International Criminal Court issued a warrant for arrest for Mr. Al Hassan Mahm... more In early 2018 The International Criminal Court issued a warrant for arrest for Mr. Al Hassan Mahmoud of Timbuktu, Mali. The case can be situated at the nexus of international criminal law, violent extremism, Islam and gender. The still ongoing Al-Hassan case is not the direct focus and this paper does not address the guilt or innocence of Al-Hassan, or the evidentiary and procedural issues at stake in the case. Rather, I am interested in how this nexus came about in creating the space for the Al-Hassan case, and in seeding the ground for similar cases. To this end, I adopt a wide-angle perspective of the case by describing and analyzing the background global governance projects that have contributed to the emergence of this case and defined the terms through which various atrocities in Northern Mail are understood and engaged with. In particular, I argue that there are three important and interrelated projects that map the coordinates of this wide-angle perspective – namely, Countering Violent Extremism, Lawfare and International Conflict Feminism. By describing them as ‘global governance projects’ I seek to capture how each of these entails an amalgam of ideologies and institutional arrangements with transnational currency in the current moment. That currency feeds off dominant structures of global governance and makes their driving logics the thinkable default option and renders their legitimacy a matter of common sense for diverse groups, from feminist lawyers to military strategists. The Al-Hassan case is the grain of sand through which we examine the universe of actors, structures and institutional practices that have been strengthened by this case coming forward, and those that have been defeated. By foregrounding the complex architecture of these three governance agendas this paper seeks to better understand how notions of ‘Islamic extremism’ get mobilized in conjunction with gender based persecution, and, the work of this convergence in the terrain of international criminal law. This piece is a chapter in Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami and Nadera Shalhoub eds, in The Cunning of Gender Violence (Forthcoming with Duke University Press 2022)

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Engle, nesiah, otto final draft

Feminist Approaches to International Law Forthcoming in International Legal Theory: Foundations and Frontiers (Jeffrey Dunoff and Mark Pollack, eds.)(Cambridge University Press, 2020), 2020

The putative crisis of international law, today as well as in other eras, is inseparable from its... more The putative crisis of international law, today as well as in other eras, is inseparable from its own production of crisis. That is, traditional approaches to international law generally see it as a means to address, manage, and resolve crises. In this telling, international law does not participate in the production of crisis; it is not the problem, but the solution.
When international law seems unable to respond effectively to crisis, it is often seen as “in crisis.” Our chapter considers this dynamic in the context of feminist approaches to international law. We are particularly interested in the role of these approaches in the production of crisis, in the international legal attempt to manage or resolve crisis, and in the
creation of the sense that international law is in crisis when it fails to do so.

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